"Cocksure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... envy the Emperor the job of tackling her," said Gorman. "He won't find it a bit pleasant. I daresay he doesn't know Madame Ypsilante. He wouldn't be so cocksure of himself if he did. She's the kind of woman who throws things about if she's the least irritated. If the Emperor suggests her selling those jewels there'll be a riot. But it's no business of mine. If that Emperor of yours really enjoys a rag with ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... point of evolution. Why is it, then, that mothers will—will—will—try, so mistakenly, to extirpate the jewel of honest, manly savagery from the breasts of their boys? I wonder if they know that when grown men see one of these "pretty-mannered boys," cocksure as a Swiss toy new painted and directed by watch spring, they feel an unholy impulse to empty an ink-bottle over the young calf? Fauntleroy kids are a reproach to our civilization. Men, women and children, all of us, crowd around the grimy Deignan of the Merrimac crew, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... though—then stopped to listen. The night was very clear: a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily believe chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion I had seen—if indeed I had seen anything. I was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... blacked Aunt Meda's walking boots, before she went to Hallsport, with axle grease, while the girl was 'telling novels' to him! Tave said Roman told him she knew a lot of the nobility, marchionesses and 'sich'; and now Roman struts around cocksure, high and mighty as if he'd just been made K.C.B., and there's no getting any steady work out of him. You should have seen Tave's face when ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... man's pale face, and shook his head. In a way, he thought, it was a pity to see such a change in the rosy-cheeked, dapper, cocksure little man who had talked his way glibly in and out of more jams than Meyerhoff could count. Trading brought scalpers; it was almost inevitable that where rich and unexploited trading ground was uncovered, it would first fall prey to ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... settled everything from an earthworm to a cosmos; next she was eagerly reading such unbaked works as Bray's Philosophy of Necessity and the essays of certain young scientists who, without knowledge of either philosophy or religion, were cocksure of their ability to provide "modern" substitutes for ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... couldst scare him out of his wits, then should I ha' the wench, cocksure. I doubt ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... too cocksure o' that," returned Tom, looking about him well, to make certain of his direction. "Howsomdever, we ain't got the time to search the place properly now, as it'll be dark soon, and we ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... he called, and Vernon reappeared on the threshold. "Take a look at this," he added, and held out the note. "Maybe you won't be so cocksure hereafter that diplomats are always making ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... able to take his lurch with a firm grip on the balustrade; but he felt depth yawning behind him. Dourly, he took thirty seconds to retrieve the cleat; stitching had been sawed through by a metal edge—just as he'd told the cocksure workman it would be. Oh, to have a world where imbecility wasn't entrenched! Well—he was fighting here and now for the resources to found one. He resumed the escalade, ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... so damned cocksure," rapped out his uncle, his exasperation showing in heightened color and snapping eyes. "It's that same cocksureness which has almost brought the British Empire to the ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... reduced Churchill it was regarded as a second Gibraltar. Yet Churchill and Nelson and Quebec and Louisburg all fell before a foreign foe, and Europe is nearer to-day than she was in those eras of terrible defeat. What additional fortifications or defenses has Canada to be so cocksure that history can never repeat itself? She is not resting under the Monroe Doctrine. It is a safe wager that many Canadians have never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Besides, the minute Canada voluntarily enters a European war, does she forfeit American "protection" under that Monroe ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... this instance far more ingenuity had been displayed in the number and nature of the side attractions. There were guessing machines where the cocksure were reduced to humbleness of mind by their failures to state accurately the number of women voting in the world or some section thereof; the number of countries that have recently swung into line in the woman movement; the number of subjects reigned over by women, and similar questions, ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... country and these people are not the country and the people they were three years ago. They are very different. They are much more democratic, far less cocksure, far less haughty, far humbler. The man at the head of the army rose from the ranks. The Prime Minister is a poor Welsh schoolteacher's son, without early education. The man who controls all British ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... angry she called her father an "old country Jake." Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing New York as the home of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... be so, the stuff is full of squid beaks. But Garboy is too cocksure. Anyway we have the stuff, and stowed safe in the lazaret. Counting what we picked up before, we have 1,500 pounds. A great fortune for the owners, and a fine bonus for us. When I get home, I will buy a ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... critics of conduct themselves would not dare, The trivial cocksure belittlers of dangers they have not to share, Claim much—oh so much, from rough manhood,—unflinching cool daring in fray, And selflessness utter, from toilers with little ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various
... outside me, eh? But suppose that impulse carries me and I do the thing—that impulse is part of me, is it not? Ah! My brain reels at these mysteries! Lord! what flimsy fluctuating things we are—first this, then that, a thought, an impulse, a deed and a forgetting, and all the time madly cocksure we are ourselves. And as for you—you who have hardly learned to think for more than five or six short years, there you sit, assured, coherent, there you sit in all your inherited original sin—Hallucinatory Windlestraw!—judging and condemning. You know Right from Wrong! My boy, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... leads to, my pippin, I'm cocksure can't 'ave a wus smell. Like bad eggs, salt, and tenpenny nails biled in bilge water. Eugh! Old Pump Well? Wy then let well alone, is my motter, or leastways, it would be, I'm sure, But for BLACK—local doctor, a stunner!—who's got me in 'and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... do. I've thought of it a lot lately—in bed and about. I was thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It's not irreverent for me to say it, I hope—but God comes in on the off-chance, George. See? Don't you be too cocksure of anything, good or bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well, do you think I—particular as I am—would have touched those Union Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn't thought it a thoroughly good ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Blue Goose, with the idea of furthering his benign influence. Hartwell, Morrison, and Pierre were sitting around a table in the private office, Hartwell impatient for action, Pierre unobtrusively alert, Morrison cocksure to the verge ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... cocksure and triumphant girl meets more than her match in an old peasant woman, the mother of the man she wants ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... the rest of the brief evening was decidedly awkward. Yes, she was changing, growing fast. And Roger did not like it. Here she was spending money like water, absorbed in her pleasures, having no baby, apparently at loose ends with her husband, and through it all so cocksure of herself and her outrageous views about war, and smiling about them with such an air, and in her whole manner, such a tone of amused superiority. She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort of rot; she spoke blithely ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... again, and grew strangely significant. This man was passing through adversity! It seemed tragic and shocking to her that he should have to pass through adversity, that he could not remain for ever triumphant, brilliant, cocksure in all his grand schemes, and masculinely scathless. It seemed wrong to her that he should suffer, and desirable that anybody should suffer rather than he. George Cannon with faulty linen! By what error of destiny had this heart-rending phenomenon of discord been caused? (Yes, heart-rending!) ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... millions of living beings were everywhere extremely busy after something, yet hardly any two of them agreed exactly what it was they sought. There were sects, societies, religions by the score, each one cocksure it knew and had found Reality, yet proving by the continuous busy searching that it had not found it. Yet all, oddly enough, fitted in together fairly well, as in a gigantic Dance, though obviously none ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... Orme not unpleasantly. He liked Chicago, felt towards the Western city something more than the tolerant, patronizing interest which so often characterizes the Eastern man. To him it was the hub of genuine Americanism—young, aggressive, perhaps a bit too cocksure, but ever bounding along with eyes toward the future. Here was the city of great beginnings, the city of experiment—experiment with life; hence its incompleteness—an incompleteness not dissimilar ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... cold and still. 'It's no good, no good,' he said, 'I don't understand; I can't follow you. I was always stupid, always bigoted and cocksure. These things have never seemed anything but old women's tales to me. And now I must pay for it. And this Nicholas Sabathier; you say ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the table promptly stood up, awaiting no second invitation to that look of Blenham's. Were one staging a morality play and in search of the personification of impertinence, he need look no farther than this cocksure youth. He was just at that age when one is determined that there shall be no mistake about his status in the matters of age and worldly experience; in short, something over twenty-one, when the male of the species ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... Girls, I mean. At least, I suppose a good many girls are like me. If Gerald had died and I had lost him that way, I know quite well I shouldn't be feeling as I do now. I should have been broken-hearted, but it wouldn't have been the same. It's my pride that is hurt. I have always been a bossy, cocksure little creature, swaggering about the world like an English sparrow; and now I'm paying for it! Oh, Ginger, I'm paying for it! I wonder if running away is going to do me any good at all. Perhaps, if Mr. Faucitt has some real hard work for ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... Yet a few pages on is a marvelous Fugue in C sharp minor with five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a little distance and you land in the E flat Fugue with its assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering, gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in F? Its germ is perhaps the F major Invention, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Harry!" he cried. "If it wasn't for the men with me, I would try for sport. You are so cocksure about the lot you can do, Captain. You would aggravate ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything else to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In Juventud-Egolatria ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfully shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years before starting to write. And he still ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... (hair disheveled, heavy shoulders humped, teeth grinding savagely under puffed and bristling lips, huge hands at the ends of long, curving arms, spreading and closing with the desire to clutch and rend). Yet Big Tom was plainly not so cocksure of himself as he had been, while the scoutmaster wore ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... open question whether the man who follows the gleam, with inspiration to beckon him, does not come nearer to the truth than the man of calculating caution who sums up and weighs. Sometimes crabbed age awakes to the realisation that the cocksure aim of youth is on occasion nearer to the mark than the aim directed by cold intellect, plotted out on a diagram, and worked out correct to three places of decimals. It is perfectly possible for the cautious and orthodox pedestrian ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... to hear Yellow God palaver?" he said rapidly. "Very well, I tell you, you cocksure white men who think you know everything, but know nothing at all. My people, people of the Asiki, that mean people of Spirits, what you call ghosts and say you no believe in, but always look for behind door, they worship Yellow God, Bonsa Big and Bonsa Little, worship ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the opposite type. She makes decisions with great promptness, never hesitates, is "cocksure" and aggressive. If M. is ambivalent, his sister B. M. is univalent. Choice is an easy matter to her, though she is not impulsive. She rapidly deliberates. She never has made any serious errors in judgment, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... cheaper places," he chortled, "and the owner gave me the advantage of the broker's commission, too. Come out next spring and see what a bargain I found." In late May there came a wail for help from the cocksure buyer. A few days of unseasonably warm weather and a strong east wind had revealed the reason for the bargain. Back of a wooded area to the rear of his holding, was a combination hog farm and refuse dump. The owner of it got little or no rental from the tenant farmer who carried ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... sagely reminded them just before they pulled away from the Narcissus, "the German is both cautious and cocksure. The capture of his bombing party has been effected without a sound; the commander saw our men leave the steamer in the boats; he sees the Narcissus now not under command and wallowing; he figures that all is lovely and the goose honks high. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... What's the scheme?" Still Fitz did not speak, and Poole went on—"It ought to be something good to make you so cocksure. I have gone over it all again and again, turned it upside down and downside up, and I can't get at anything one-half so good as old Chips's cock-and-bull notions. I suppose you are cleverer than I am, and if you are, so much the better, for it's horrible ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... dead Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his slender legs comfortably and looked at me with a queer little tilt of his left eyebrow, but with an unsmiling visage. He was too cocksure of himself to grant me even so much as an ingratiating smile. Was not I a glory-seeking American and he one of the glorious? It would be doing me a favour to let ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... reflections, etc., are often quite amusing.... He is so cocksure he has made a great discovery—which is the most palpable of mare's nests.—Yours ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the Germans was increasing Turkish stubbornness and creating friction and ill-feeling. The German military character brooks no opposition; the Turks like to postpone till to-morrow what should be done to-day. The latter were cocksure after their two successes at Gaza they could hold us up; the Germans believed that with an offensive against us they would hold us in check till the ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... deserting him the way I did; and I also wonder what became of him. I suppose he must be dead long before this, and 'Tummas,' too, poor fellow; for I didn't see anything of them among the prisoners yesterday. I never trusted those Senecas; but Wilkins was so cocksure of them that he wouldn't listen to a word against them. Wonder what he'll say now. I wouldn't be here at this moment, though, if it hadn't been for that fellow, 'Zebra,' as Bullen called him. Queer how things turn out in this funny old world! I only wish I knew just what that tattooing ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... tell you the truth, I didn't take a great fancy to Mr. Hardley," Tom said. "I think he's altogether too cocksure, and takes too much for granted. Still I may misjudge him. Certainly he doesn't have a chance at a million ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... fear of the future of the prisoners,' he said, in a low whisper. 'They are not bound for the Barbadoes, nor will this skinflint of a captain have the selling of them, for all that he is so cocksure. If he can bring his own skin out of the business, it will be more than I expect. He hath a man aboard his ship who would think no more of giving him a tilt over the side ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with it. The case is quite simple. The world can't get on without morals; and Catholicism, Anglicanism too—the religions of authority in short—are the great guardians of morals. They are the binding forces—the forces making for solidarity and continuity. Your cocksure, peering Protestant is the dissolvent—the force making for ruin. What's his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me—it is perfectly open to you to say'—he looked away from her, half-forgetting ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to laugh at the German Hausfrau, and pity her for a drudge; and it is the way with many Germans to talk as if all Englishwomen were pleasure loving and incompetent. The less people know of a foreign nation the greater nonsense they talk in general, and the more cocksure they are about their own opinions. A year ago, when I was in Germany, I asked a friend I could trust if there really was much Anglophobia abroad except in the newspapers. She reflected a little before she answered, for she was honest ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Listen, and I'll tell you. This fiancee of mine that you seem so cocksure about has no existence. I give you my honour that it is so, and that I am glad of it.... Yes—glad of it! How could I bear to think I was inflicting myself on a woman I loved, and making her life a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... forgiveness as he gave the command which sent this flowering youth to its fate. And she found it amusing! He could not see how genuinely comic was his own unreconstructed ardor—how exaggerated was his cocksure manner—how thoroughly he spoke as though he himself had bled on ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... bear one thing in mind, my dear Roddy, You are never, now or hereafter, to pity me. Qualis artifex. . . . I used to smile to myself in a cocksure youthful way when great men hinted in great books that one had to make burnt-sacrifice of the eye's delight, the heart's desire; the lust of the flesh, the pride of the intellect; see them all consumed to a handful of dust, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... said Mrs. Lascelles, smiling indulgently; "but what is it? How do you define it? It isn't 'side,' and yet I can quite imagine people who don't know him thinking that it is. He is cocksure of himself, but of nothing else; that seems to me to be the difference. No one could possibly be more simple in himself. He may have the assurance of a man of fifty, yet it isn't put on; it's neither ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... you—she, too, is a scientist. It was in my undergraduate days that we met, and ere the half-hour struck we were quarrelling felicitously over Weismann and the neo-Darwinians. I was at Berkeley at the time, a cocksure junior; and she, far maturer as a freshman, was at Stanford, carrying more culture with her into her university than is given the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the boy into action. He had met Gilbert Palgrave out hunting. He had seen the impertinent, cocksure way in which he ran his eyes over women. He clutched the handle of the case and said: "That's all right, thanks. Miss Ludlow will write to Mrs. Palgrave." Then he turned and went down ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... was required by the circumstances. Quite the contrary; and Verloc was as well aware of that as any other revolutionist of his standing. What an immense joke if Verloc had simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of the revolutionary world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure Professor as well. Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed almost certain that he did! Poor beggar! It struck him as very possible that of that household of two it wasn't precisely the man ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... warrior. But there was much more than this scientific and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency. We have striking evidence of this in the Trostgedanken, the Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence, which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and eventful career. But this is not all; for most ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... be too cocksure. We understand our business better than that, we don't go into it single-handed. You've collared me for a bit, but I'm not the ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... motionless, his feet set well apart and his hands thrust into his trousers pockets. The trim, natty figure, the spruce and Summer-like attire, the small, wizened face with its cynically humorous and wide-awake aspect— above all, a certain jauntiness of air and cocksure expression— certainly did not suggest a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Thorndyke, as we took our places in the carriage, "though I expect the police are pretty cocksure. When ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... October they had been cut down to two-thirds. Whether, therefore, the Government was right in ordering the withdrawal, or Nelson in his condemnation of it, may be left to the decision of those fortunate persons who can be cocksure of the true solution of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... though I didn't foresee the way of it. If ever I felt tempted to believe our engagement was getting to be the real thing, why, I said to myself, 'Wait till she sees March again before you begin to be cocksure, my man.' Well, now you've seen him. And I guess you've seen in the same minute that our ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... like being told what to do, especially by a little cocksure midget. But there was the matter of getting rid of a bad problem. ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... optimism, but the effect passes quickly, and each succeeding reinoculation has been less and less effective, with the monotonous questioning, ever more sardonic in tone: "How can you be deluded by the official bulletins?" or: "What do you know about war, to make you so cocksure?" ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... Hammerton, cocksure of his game and pleasantly cheered by the potent draught, thought that he had never interviewed so ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... guy on my side gave me a cocksure smile and the short guy said, "We're about to leave St. Louis on U.S. 40, Cornell. I hope you won't find this journey ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... understand that the police arrangements were quite adequate for the occasion, that everything would be done as quietly and as leniently as possible; and that no edge of the disturbance would in any case be allowed to overflow in the direction of the royal palace. As he listened to the cocksure tone of this new minister, and the almost patronizing air with which he exposed his official fitness for the post so recently conferred on him, the King ceased to ask questions—let the man talk himself out,—and then, when silence ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... black brand on any feller; as my mother used to say, never say a bad thing till ye ask, 'Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary?' An' I tell you, the older I git, the slower I jedge; when I wuz your age, I wuz a steel trap on a hair trigger, an' cocksure. I tell you, there ain't anythin' wiser nor a sixteen-year-old boy, 'cept ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... would so wound and hurt Peggie Wynne? Could it be possible that there really was some mystery about that will of which only Barthorpe knew the secret? It was incomprehensible to Mr. Halfpenny that any man could be so cool, so apparently cocksure about matters as Barthorpe was unless he felt absolutely certain of his own case. What that case could be, Mr. Halfpenny could not imagine—the only thing really certain was that Barthorpe seemed resolved on laying ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... talk to him before he was locked up," Richey explained. "He's clever enough to be worth knowing, and, besides, I'm not so cocksure of his guilt as our friend the Patch on the Seat of Government. No murderer worthy of the name needs six different motives for the same crime, beginning with robbery, and ending ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... insulted. He resigned his position, arrogantly declaring that he would not work for a house where results were so little appreciated. He was cocksure of himself. However, when he offered his services to a competing firm, his application was turned down. The rebuff stunned him. He did not realize that his egotism disgusted the second executive as much as the first. The salesman's spirit was broken. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... And I want war. I want to go out and help lambaste those infernally cocksure armies of that jelly-and-cream King. We've parleyed long enough. Now we'll fight. Force is the only ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... believe Stewart is any detective, either," said Richard Hartley. "He's altogether too cocksure. That sort of man would rather die than admit he is wrong about anything. He's a good old chap, though, isn't he? I liked him to-day better than ever before. I thought he was rather pathetic when he went on ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... gathered from Tom Armstrongs's prompt acceptance of such alibi evidence, touching myself, as would have merely tended to unfathomable speculations on metempsychosis in an ether-poised Hamlet-mind. Tom, though crushing for a couple of ounces, was one of your practical, decided, cocksure men; guided by unweighed, unanalysed phenomena, and governed by conviction alone—the latter being based simply, though solidly, upon itself. These men are deaf to the symphony of the Silences; blind to the horizonless areas ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... must have noticed that he's a bit downhearted. He has been beaten every time, and he goes into a race now expecting to be beaten, and is therefore beaten before he starts. He needs encouragement, and we have to consider that fact in arranging his handicap. Then there's Smith. He's too cocksure. He has never had any difficulty in beating men of his own class. He needs putting on his mettle. So we increase his handicap accordingly. It takes a lot of working out, and a lot of thinking about, I tell you. But here ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... question I should like to ask," Graveling intervened, plunging into the discussion, "and that is, why are you so cocksure, Mr. Maraton, of Government support in favour of the men? You said in your speech to-night, so far as I remember, that if the masters wouldn't give in without, Government must force them to see the rights of the matter. And not only that, but Government should ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above—like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny. It was as if this Ziemianitch could not possibly have done anything else. And Sophia Antonovna's cocksure and contemptuous "some police-hound" was characteristically Russian in another way. But there was no tragedy there. This was a comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a game with all of them in ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad |
